As furniture and home goods sales have moved online, retail experts told me, more and more stores have sought a piece of the action. But instead of sourcing or creating their own products, many large retailers have relied on overlapping networks of manufacturers, distributors and third-party sellers — creating a baffling (and frankly, shady) shopping environment where many sites sell identical or near-identical items under different names and at wildly different prices.

A few different trends are at play here, and it’s sometimes difficult to know exactly which one you’re witnessing. When I first began looking into this phenomenon two years ago,1 I assumed my lamp and its many, many twins were the obvious product of white-labeling — a popular and growing practice in which competing retailers purchase the same generic product from a single manufacturer, then market it to consumers under different brand names.

This is likely true for many doppelganger products — but certainly not every one. George John, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota, told me the furniture and home goods industries also have a long-time affection for a technique called “branded variance,” wherein they create slightly different versions of the same item for different retailers.

Among the most eye-opening details in this article, about one-fifth of the value of U.S. online orders are returned every year. That is an enormous amount of waste — potential and realized.

By improving home charging for urban apartment dwellers and prioritizing vehicles with smaller batteries, rather than road-trip-enabling charging stations and big batteries, we could maximize the miles we can affordably electrify. In an era of battery scarcity, we could have two 150-mile E.V.s for the battery capacity in every 300-mile E.V. Or, using the same 300-mile E.V. battery, you could have six plug-in hybrids with 50 miles of electric range for daily driving and a gasoline engine for those rarer road trips or many, many more e-bikes.

Rather than holding E.V. adoption hostage to our ability to make batteries match internal combustion in every way, government policy should focus on the cases where E.V.s have advantages that internal combustion will never match: waking up every morning with a full “tank” sufficient for daily commuting and errands.